I can give two examples here of the fundamental privacy of consciousness here. Apologies if this becomes a long post.

If you are not from the UK you may not have heard of Harold Shipman but he is considered our most prolific serial killer who is thought to have killed hundreds of mainly old ladies by overdoses.

However his wife always stuck by him declaring his innocence until he died from suicide in prison.

So Prudence Shipman went to bed every night next to a mass murderer but she had no access to this information hidden in his mind. He must have had hundreds if not thousands of memories relating to the killings floating around.

This is the absurdity that arises from mental privacy is that we communicate a veneer of our mind through language that can mask immense diversity.

The other example is that my elder brother has been paralysed by MS for many years where he can only blink or slightly shake is head and I cared for him for several years in the past when I lived with him for around 6 years. During this Period and to the present I never assumed I knew what it was like to be my brother and I find people who second guess in this situation impose their believes on the ill person.

To be a good carer you are supposed to ask what the person you are caring through wants exactly. You can never assume you know better than them. With my own mental health issues it has been really painful combatting peoples prejudices about why you are how you are and that includes damaging interactions with the mental health services.

So I think an excess of (alleged) objectivity can lead to just ignoring the role and value of subjective input. It is implausible we can replace symbolic language with pointing at brain scans or subsume consciousness under a physicalist paradigm.

It is challenging the idea that consciousness is an emergent property, that can be readily explained eventually and derived from natural selection.

I don't agree that science has access to other people's consciousness to examine it objectively like cell mechanisms. Here I am highlighting the problem of accessing consciousness in order to study it and reduce it to a mechanistic by product and the weakness of neural correlations as access to mental content.

I don't agree that science has access to other people's consciousness to examine it objectively like cell mechanisms. Here I am highlighting the problem of accessing consciousness in order to study it and reduce it to a mechanistic by product and the weakness of neural correlations as access to mental content.

The correlation is pretty clear. No brain = no consciousness.

The brain is explained by embryonic development. Embryonic development is explained by the genome. The genome is explained by natural selection and evolution.

It is challenging the idea that consciousness is an emergent property, that can be readily explained eventually and derived from natural selection.

You haven't made any such argument. Your thoughts are private because there is no outward indication of what goes on inside your head. That should not be all that surprising given that your skull is opaque. That condition would be the same whether or not consciousness was an emergent property.

Get a better argument.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)

I was thinking as long as I have my hands up … they’re not going to shoot me. This is what I’m thinking — they’re not going to shoot me. Wow, was I wrong. -- Charles Kinsey

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. Thomas Jefferson

You haven't made any such argument. Your thoughts are private because there is no outward indication of what goes on inside your head. That should not be all that surprising given that your skull is opaque. That condition would be the same whether or not consciousness was an emergent property.

Get a better argument.

It's nothing to do with the skull or failure to access the brain and neurons etc it is that consciousness is private subjective and only directly accessible one person the experiencing subject. It is not accessible in principle to any other than the self.

You never have access to anyone's consciousness other than your own. Looking at someone's behaviour or their brain is not observing their consciousness.

If I am in pain you can never experience it and looking at my brain or body is not accessing my pain.

There are lots of phenomena that are dependent on one another but do not fully describe the individual phenomena. You are assuming consciousness can only arise in brains and in certain types of brains. What properties of the brain make it the only type of thing that could be associated with or cause consciousness.

And by consciousness here I explicitly mean the experiencer who is subject to experiences, the subjective perspective and so. In consciousness studies there has been a lot argument about not restricting consciousness to brains and proposing artificial consciousness and consciousness in animals with different nervous systems.

Nevertheless I don't see how evolution explains this property or predicts or ensures it.

I am sure natural selection would select something as rich as consciousness.....select it after it began to exist for no reason as a free disposition from nature. It seems nature and chemistry/physics gives a lot of free gifts to evolution for it to work with. Hence the primeval soup of treasures.

It is challenging the idea that consciousness is an emergent property, that can be readily explained eventually and derived from natural selection.

You haven't made any such argument. Your thoughts are private because there is no outward indication of what goes on inside your head. That should not be all that surprising given that your skull is opaque. That condition would be the same whether or not consciousness was an emergent property.

Get a better argument.

It looks like AndrewPD is trying to make the argument that consciousness is god-given rather than an emergent property of the brain due to our current lack of knowledge re the connection between brain function and consciousness.

This ignores all the various levels of consciousness in other organisms that show it is a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind/type/category.

Nevertheless I don't see how evolution explains this property or predicts or ensures it.

There is no Theory of Consciousness. Without a consensus on what Consciousness is, what causes causes consciousness - it is not surprising that we don't have a specific answer as to how it came to be. The question then is, so what?

I am sure natural selection would select something as rich as consciousness

How can you be sure?

For all we know what was being selected was higher order thinking. The meta cognition of thinking about thinking and thinking about thinking about thinking - which in turn may have arose as a function of social need - understanding what others are thinking and what they think you are thinking and what they think you think they are thinking. Which might lead to a state of awareness about ones self that we have come to call consciousness.

Thus - consciousness itself is just a consequence that arose because other properties were being selected for that resulted in it. How can you be sure this is not the case? Since we cannot agree on a Theory of Consciousness - how can we say it isn't a spandrel?

It seems nature and chemistry/physics gives a lot of free gifts to evolution for it to work with.

Looking at the epic pile of dead bodies that are left behind makes me think maybe 'free' isn't the right word here. There are gifts, but in order to 'find' them - requires a lot of wandering about in 'genespace' - and a consequently large number of deaths - so they are certainly paid for.

You are assuming consciousness can only arise in brains and in certain types of brains. What properties of the brain make it the only type of thing that could be associated with or cause consciousness.

I am making no such assumption. What I am doing is OBSERVING that human consciousness arises from the human brain. No human brain, no human consciousness.

In consciousness studies there has been a lot argument about not restricting consciousness to brains and proposing artificial consciousness and consciousness in animals with different nervous systems.

We are still talking about physical biological structures that are produced by embryonic development. Embryonic development is controlled by the genome, and the genome is a product of natural selection and evolution.

Nevertheless I don't see how evolution explains this property or predicts or ensures it.

"Signatories of the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism must either hold a Ph.D. in a scientific field such as biology, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, computer science, or one of the other natural sciences; or they must hold an M.D. and serve as a professor of medicine. Signatories must also agree with the following statement:

“We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

quote: The listed affiliations and areas of expertise of the signatories have also been criticized,[1][12] with many signatories coming from wholly unrelated fields of academia, such as aviation and engineering, computer science and meteorology.[38]

In addition, the list was signed by only about 0.01% of scientists in the relevant fields. According to the National Science Foundation, there were approximately 955,300 biological scientists in the United States in 1999.[39] Only about 1/4 of the approximately 700 Darwin Dissenters in 2007 are biologists, according to Kenneth Chang of the New York Times.[12] Approximately 40% of the Darwin Dissenters are not identified as residing in the United States, so in 2007, there were about 105 US biologists among the Darwin Dissenters, representing about 0.01% of the total number of US biologists that existed in 1999. The theory of evolution is overwhelmingly accepted throughout the scientific community.[21] Professor Brian Alters of McGill University, an expert in the creation-evolution controversy, is quoted in an article published by the NIH as stating that "99.9 percent of scientists accept evolution".[40]

The list has been criticized by many organizations and publications for lacking any true experts in the relevant fields of research, primarily biology. Critics have noted that of the 105 "scientists" listed on the original 2001 petition, fewer than 20% were biologists, with few of the remainder having the necessary expertise to contribute meaningfully to a discussion of the role of natural selection in evolution.[11][12]

Critics have also noted that the wording and advertising of the original statement was, and remains, misleading,[11] and that a review of the signatories suggested many doubt evolution due to religious, rather than scientific beliefs.[12] Robert T. Pennock notes that rather than being a "broad dissent", the statement's wording is "very narrow, omitting any mention of the evolutionary thesis of common descent, human evolution or any of the elements of evolutionary theory except for the Darwinian mechanism, and even that was mentioned in a very limited and rather vague manner." He concludes that it is not in fact a "radical statement".[41]

Note especially the last paragraph.

Of course any discussion of that meaningless list would be incomplete without Project Steve. 1,417 scientists have signed:

quote: Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to "intelligent design," to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation's public schools.

And each and every one is named Steve or some variant, including the renowned Professor Steve S. Steve. Approximately 1% of scientists are named Steve, so the signatories represent only a tiny fraction of scientists who would sign that statement.

(In case you haven't figured it out, the list is a joke mocking the foolish DI list and others creationists have produced.)